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Another reason to love the last weeks of summer: You may be able to see the northern lights tonight and tomorrow night in over a dozen northern states. If you missed the recent Perseid meteor shower, don’t fret, this light show is forecast to run Monday, August 18 through Wednesday, August 20, in Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Alaska, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. The agencys three-day forecast is predicting minor, G1 geomagnetic storms (on a scale of G1 to G5). During these storms, a stream of solar wind from a coronal hole on the sun creates the aurorasor swaths of blue, green, and purple in the skywhen it reaches Earth. When is the best time to see the northern lights? The aurora borealis is usually best observed after sunset or just before sunrise, away from well-lit areas, per the NOAA. The best time to see this week’s northern lights is between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., according to ABC News, as the moon is expected to rise in the early morning hours, making the sky appear even darker and increasing the chance of seeing swaths of pink and green light. The NOAA predicts increased solar activity will remain high through 2025 and into 2026 as a result of an 11-year sun cycle peaking through October. You can track the aurora on the NOAAs page, where the agency is providing updates.
Category:
E-Commerce
The targeted murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December put the business world on alert. Companies beyond the insurance and healthcare industries began ramping up security for founders and CEOs, worried that Thompson’s death (and some of the publics reaction to it), along with rising cyberattacks and death threats, could increase real-world risks for any business leader. That has led to a substantial increase in security spending, and a new study from the Financial Times finds that no company is spending more to protect its CEO than Meta. Security spending was up more than 10% last year at the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, with $27 million spent to protect Mark Zuckerberg$3 million more than in 2023. We believe that Mr. Zuckerbergs role puts him in a unique position: He is synonymous with Meta and, as a result, negative sentiment regarding our company is directly associated with, and often transferred to, Mr. Zuckerberg, the company says in its 2025 proxy statement. Google parent Alphabet and Amazon also saw increases of more than 10% in protection costs last year. Altogether, the 10 major tech firms spent more than $45 million to protect their leaders. Metas spending dwarfed all others. The next highest was Alphabet, which allocated $6.8 million to protect Sundar Pichai. Coinbase spent nearly as much, dedicating $6.2 million to guard CEO Brian Armstrong. The big question on many minds, though, is how much is being spent to protect Elon Musk, arguably the most polarizing of the tech CEOs. The answer isnt entirely clear. Only one of his companies, Tesla, is public, and it disclosed spending $500,000 to protect Musk last year (down from $2.4 million in 2023). SpaceX and xAI are private and did not disclose figures. Musk also owns his own security company, Foundation Securitydescribed as a mini Secret Service, run in part by a former Army special forces weapons sergeant. While some companies have boosted spending, others have scaled back, perhaps due to one-time expenses in previous years. Heres what other corporations reported: Nvidia: $3.5 million to protect CEO Jensen Huang, up from $2.2 million in 2023 Apple: $1.4 million for Tim Cook, down from $2.4 million in 2023 Amazon: $1.1 million for CEO Andy Jassy, and $1.6 million for Jeff Bezos, an amount consistent for at least 15 years Palo Alto Networks: $1.6 million for CEO Nikesh Arora, down from $3.5 million in 2023 JPMorgan: $882,000 for CEO Jamie Dimon, up slightly from $866,000 in 2023 Some companies declined to break out their security costs but offered hints. Fox, for example, said it was spending more to protect CEO Lachlan Murdoch as partisanship grows. Lockheed Martin now requires its CEO to fly exclusively on private corporate jets. And Alex Karp, CEO of AI and military intelligence company Palantir, always travels with at least four bodyguards. For some executives, the threat is very real, and not always tied to corporate activities. Musk, for example, told shareholders last year: “We actually did have two homicidal maniacs in the last roughly seven months come to aspirationally try to kill me.” The number of businesses protecting their CEOs continues to rise. Intelligence firm Equilar found that 34.4% of companies in the S&P 500 offered executive security last year, compared to just 28.2% in 2023. Median spending rose 6% overall, with an average of $105,749.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump has big plans for redesigning the way states hold elections ahead of the 2026 midterms, calling for a nationwide end to mail-in ballots and voting machines on Monday. The U.S. Constitution stands in his way. In a new post on his social network Truth Social, Trump wrote that he was “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” as well as voting machines, which he called “Highly ‘Inaccurate'” and “Seriously Controversial.” “ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS,” Trump wrote without providing evidence supporting his claims. Presidents aren’t given power over state election law. The “Elections Clause” in Article I Section 4, leaves “the times, places, and manner of holding elections” for the U.S. House and Senate up to the states, and only Congress is given power “make or alter” these rules. The Elections Clause is one of the Constitution’s many built-in mechanisms for separating and checking power, and already, federal judges have blocked parts of a past Trump executive order that would have imposed federal rules over elections. Undermining election integrity Trump’s attacks on election infrastructurefrom mail-in ballots to ballot drop boxes have forced local elections officials to find new ways to build trust. Maricopa County, Arizona, gave tours of its tabulation and election centers ahead of the 2024 election, while in Ada County, Idaho, officials now publish every ballot online. Ironically, voting records show Trump has himself voted early, and after opposing early voting measures and calling them fraudulent ahead of his 2020 election loss, he paid lip service to early voting in 2024. A Republican “Swamp the Vote” initiative in 2024 asked Trump supporters to pledge to vote early or request a ballot in an effort to boost early turnout, and it worked. Now he wants to ban mail-in ballots entirely. Trump falsely claimed in his social media post on Monday that the U.S. is the only country with mail-in voting (at least 40 countries allow people to vote by mail), and he said he would sign an executive order ahead of next year’s midterm election to make the changes. Eight states and Washington, D.C., allow for all-mail-in elections, and an additional 15 states allow for mail-in elections in some circumstances and jurisdictions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Hollow legal ground Trump’s apparent legal argument for having the power to end mail-in voting as president, as laid out in his post, is that states are “merely an ‘agent'” for the federal government in counting and tabulating votes, and the president is the ultimate authority of the federal government. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them,” Trump wrote. Like his push for Texas to adopt new congressional districts that are gerrymandered to help Republicans, Trump’s latest election proposals are about letting the president decide policy that’s actually left up to the states, and giving the executive branch power to shape the legislative branch that was designed to act as one of its checks. Rather than a separation of powers, it’s a consolidation.
Category:
E-Commerce
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